Irish Property Market chat II - *read mod note post #1 before posting*

The link provides some details on the make up of the private rental market and hap where 85% of the tenancies were with private landlords. So as private landlords we are paying 50% on our rental income (assuming those who are above €36k income from all income sources).

About a qtr of the spend in 2019 went to corporate landlords. I would then draw two conclusions from the above figs (1) is that if 15% of the market is being accounted for by 25% of the expenses then these properties are at the high end of the price. (2) is that the above goes back to my point that half the rent paid to private landlords is going back to the State.

This brings me back again to my point of our welfare system distorting the market. I am not familiar with the Enhanced leasing scheme and have to assume this falls outside of the RPZ legislation. Can you provide a link to this?

I would also welcome an honest debate into the housing market and maybe the general public would actually get a true picture of who exactly is benefiting and who is suffering on all sides in the housing market.

I would love to see the figures of how many companies in Dublin are benefiting from their employees being on HAP or similar social welfare supports, so for instance if 50% of Starbucks employees were on minimum wage and having their rent subsidised by the government how would people feel about that?

I have no idea if its a high or low amount of people but its interesting if social welfare supports are increasing companies profits by allowing them to pay lower wages and I struggle to see how anyone on minimum wage could be paying rent in Dublin but there are also lots of business they rely on minimum wage staff.

The healthcare assistant is not the problem

The problem is a 2 bed apartment is valued more than them

Average rate of pay is 11.99 per hour and they pay more tax than the apartment

The wage is not the problem here, it's the rent.

She is an essential staff member unless you want to argue that we can do without nurses in nursing homes?

So, either we need to pay her more, which has a cost, or rent needs to come down, which is the obvious solution.

Say she didn't have HAP, her yearly rent would be 23,400.

Say she earns 38,000 a year, she will come out with approx 33,648 net

That would mean she has 10,248 for everything else, like food, heating, clothes and so on for herself and her daughter.

Again, what do you propose she should do in this situation and from a macro side, what solution would be have to fix it?

By simply having a home in Dublin mortgage or practically mortgage free the older people are in the top 1% of the wealthy in the country. Sitting on an asset with a cash value of a few hundred thousand, even if they are relatively cash light on a day to day basis, still puts them miles ahead of any renting person or person with a long way to go on their mortgage.

And most likely these older people paid a relative pittance for their homes and have never had to pay for the increase in value the home has achieved solely due to the city expanding and becoming more condensed around them. The luas, dundrum town centre, bus services, more local services etc they have all benefitted from, in particular, with their house price appreciation showing this. To object to the next generation moving in is to pull up the ladders and hoard limited resources for themselves and this is something which should be given no legitimacy to. I think the State needs to override the individuals right to object to housing in the interests of the common good, however this needs to be achieved (eg by referendum), as these objections are a direct threat to our future economic prosperity (quite simply; lack of housing equals a lack of new jobs and a lack of new companies / expansion of existing companies).

The worst of the interest rates in the 80s still doens't bring the cost up to what people have to do now. And the interest on deposits made getting the deposit a lot easier, as well as it being much smaller in proportion to salary.

The issue we have is the cost of living in general. I have proposed on a number of occasions a number of solutions to deal with our housing and wider issues.

Firstly extend the rent a room scheme to those renting whole properties. So instead of paying €2k a month and the landlord only receives €1k and the State receives the other €1k agree with the landlord to only charge €12k a year and he gets to keep the whole €12k if he charges anything more than €12k he pays tax on all of it. This then allows the tenant save the other €12k towards a deposit for their own property. Result is it removes people for needing long term social housing support and encourages developers to build knowing there is a market, and reduces the risks to banks for lending.

Secondly radically reform the welfare housing supports system. If you don't work and have no intention of ever working you are housed where there is a vacant property. If you are an essential worker you are prioritised for social housing support.

Thirdly, we need to radically reform our welfare system overall. No welfare system should provide a better standard of living than work does. We need the majority of people to be net contributors to our tax system not net benefactors. Despite what the parties on the "left" of politics think we don't have a magic money tree. if this means reducing our welfare system to force those to work who can and choose to play the system then so be it.

To bring the above into context on your post. if we changed the criteria for people on the housing list we would reduce the demand on the housing sector both private and public. There is a cohort of people who when they turn 18 they automatically go on the housing list. These people have decided they wont even try to house themselves. I personally don't have a problem with people who actually try and fail but I do have an issue with those who choose not to even bother trying.

What you fail to realise is that the quality of housing in the 70's/80's is nowhere near what it is now. I grow up in a house built in the 70's, we had single glazed wooden windows were you woke up with frost on the inside of the window, no central heating, no flooring other than chipboard sheets. The houses kept you dry nothing else.

We had a different culture back in the 70's and 80's. We had to work for everything, we got no social welfare unless you worked. We have become to generous with our welfare.

The cost of housing nowadays is a combination of all of the inputs inclusive of land. Land is finite and it has always been a case that children had to move out further from where they grew up, people had no choice. People want the three bed semi with the garden within Dublin but we don't have the space.

so why are people who cant get a house blaming the older generation. They didnt create this mess. What do you want to do lets kick out all OAPs to the street so house the youth? You need to harness your anger at the people who caused the mess

I own a house from the 1970s and grew up in a 1980s one (including in the 80s)

Both had central heating (albeit both awful in their own ways - electrical resistance air plenum and solid fuel fired respectively), and actual wood floors from new. Concrete downstairs in the 80s one.

Construction that cheap was for council houses back then, not houses built for sale. I've never seen a house that new without some form of central heating and normal floors; except council built ones.

There would have been houses sold new with double glazing in the 80s - it's a 1900s (the decade) invention as far as I know; but it was rare til the early 90s.

And anyway - its all rather irrelevant. People buying houses in the 70s and 80s did not have it worse as is actually evident if you look at the figures. That the entire country was grim has coloured peoples memories.

Best Ive read on here in a long time.

Its amazing to read posters calling young people whingers and trying to create some fantasy alternate reality where the older generation are not being enriched at the expense of everyone else. Its laughable.

Are the older generation going to pay for all this property madness? Are they fvck!

The social welfare supports have gotten totally out of hand though, how is someone with a decent job considered homeless? Okay her salary isn't great now because Dublin is apparently full of software engineers on 100k+ and assuming her landlord evicted her but why cant she go work in a nursing home outside Dublin or live with her parents as thousands are doing?

I'm really struggling to see what the qualification criteria for HAP are these days and why the state has to bail her out but most of all I don't see any less homeless people on the streets around Cork so all these billions of euro every year don't actually seem to be solving that and i'm really wondering how many of the people classed as homeless would actually be homeless if the state stopped housing them, pretty sure they'd live with friends or family until they can move somewhere cheaper to get their life back on track.

I've seen a few headlines around recently about how CSO figures show that property prices are only 3% off their 2007 Celtic Tiger peak, with the implication seemingly being we've run out of room for prices to grow further and are nearing the top of the market.

I'm genuinely interested to know if people here think that's a reasonable comparison to make. The first thing that comes to my mind is that all the other goods that make up CPI are surely up on their 2007 level, so you might, first order, reasonably expect housing to have recovered to some level close to that. But maybe not because housing was inflated so much over and above the level of the rest of the basket of goods.

Then there's the other factors that partly determine property prices, such as interest rates and wages. Interest rates were ~double what they are now, so while Jane Doe was paying €1148/month on her 200k@5.6%, 2007 mortgage, she would be paying only €821/month on her 2022 200k@2.8% mortgage. And that's before we factor in a small bit of wage growth, and the fact that you can get at most a 90% mortgage now, rather than a 100% mortgage 15 years ago.

All this is to say that with demand so high, and labour market so tight (seems like a lot of wage inflation at the minute, leading to higher "3.5x rule caps"), there, unnervingly, seems like plenty more room to grow?

Saving for a down-payment whilst renting notwithstanding, mortgage repayments and thus home-ownership continues to feel eminently affordable right now compared to renting, even as prices keep rising. Barring massive job losses or interest rate hikes in the near future (which are both possibilities 😬), if things were left as they are, how much higher do you think prices could go?